All posts tagged Anais Mitchell

After releasing new music last month for the first time since 2008, singer and songwriter Rachel Ries today accompanies her new album with a video for the song “Time,” which premieres on Speakeasy.

The song is a moody piano number, and the clips rotates among scenes of the South Dakotan daughter of Mennonite missionaries singing alone in a darkened room, cosseted in an easy chair and wandering through a lighted, but empty, house, as if searching for something, or someone, she can’t find.

“‘Time’ is a song that lives in its own willful dreamworld—it’s both an internal battle and palliative pep talk to myself,” Ries told Speakeasy. “In making the video we wanted to keep to a bit of a fantasy world and play with elements of home, family, death and, ultimately, moving onward. It’s a capture of me, sifting through my past, oblivious to the outside and whoever may be watching.”

Ries’ new album, “Ghost of a Gardener,” is her first release since 2008’s “Country EP,” a split-45 with the singer Anaïs Mitchell. Since then, Ries has toured with Mitchell and on her own, worked in theater in Chicago and, for some reason, learned to repair Wurlitzer organs.

Two weeks ago, actress and singer Patti LuPone grabbed a cell phone out of the hand of an audience member who was texting during a performance of her current play, "Shows for Days." The bold move led to an outpouring of support from fans fed up with glowing screens. Ms. LuPone gives us her five rules of theater etiquette.